A weekly reflection from along the Pilgrim Path. This week Fr La is reflecting on ‘Banded Gneiss’.
Up at St Davog’s Seat with a group of pilgrims,
I cannot resist the obvious pun about these ‘nice rocks’.
On St Brendan’s Bed, bare pilgrim feet
meet and tread this banded gneiss.
It provides St Brigid with her Chair
and the stones that rest beside her Well.
Banded gneiss is the bedrock all the way
from here to Ballyshannon –
legacy of a meeting, aeons ago,
between two of the earth’s tectonic plates.
The meeting modified the very structure
of rock laid down long before as quiet sediment.
What meetings, I ask myself, have most deeply
formed and transformed me?
Fr La Flynn, Prior
22 February 2021